The conventional wisdom in startup circles has never been more seductive: build a charismatic founder brand, deploy a clever influencer campaign, and watch the customers pour in. A handful of high-profile AI companies have made this formula look almost effortless, turning their founders’ social feeds into customer-acquisition engines that generate buzz, waitlists, and revenue before a product even fully launches. Yet for every Cluely or Instinct that rides a viral wave to early traction, there are dozens of quieter successes that arrive there by a far less glamorous route—one that involves a telephone headset, a stack of business cards, and the willingness to hear “no” dozens of times a day.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, three founders and investors with very different playbooks laid out what customer acquisition actually looks like when the hype recedes. Elia Wallen, founder and CEO of travel-management startup Engine, has built a business that hit $150 million in bookings before taking a dime of outside capital—and did so with no visible social-media strategy whatsoever. Across the table, Grant Lee, founder and CEO of Gamma, rode a carefully engineered influencer program to a multi-billion-dollar valuation. Crystal Huang, a general partner at Google Ventures, has watched hundreds of portfolio companies navigate the same choices. Their collective insight amounts to something refreshingly unfashionable: there is no magic bullet, and the best channel depends almost entirely on what you are selling, who you are selling it to, and how much work you are willing to do.
There is no magic bullet, and the best channel depends almost entirely on what you are selling, who you are selling it to, and how much work you are willing to do.
Gamma’s Influencer Engine: Micro-Targeting Over Megaphones
Gamma’s ascent has been one of the more closely watched stories in the AI-powered productivity space. The company sells presentation software that competes with legacy tools like PowerPoint and Keynote, and it has reached a valuation north of $2 billion with roughly $100 million in annual recurring revenue. A significant part of that growth was fueled by a social-media strategy that Gamma adopted before influencer marketing became a standard line item in every startup’s budget. The program, known internally as the Gambassador initiative, recruits creators who produce content around Gamma’s features and use cases, effectively turning independent voices into a distributed sales force.
Grant Lee was blunt about what makes that approach work and what causes it to fail. The most common mistake founders make, he said, is treating influencer marketing as a set-it-and-forget-it channel—handing a creator a link, a discount code, and a vague brief, then expecting the sales to roll in. “If they’re not able to understand how to articulate the value of your product, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, it’s just going to fall flat,” Lee said. The remedy, he argued, is intensive collaboration: founders must invest real time in educating creators about the product’s nuances, its differentiation, and the specific problems it solves for specific audiences.
That last point is critical. Lee emphasized that a blanket influencer campaign—one creator, one message, one audience—rarely delivers the kind of compounding returns that make the channel worthwhile. Gamma’s product serves a wide range of use cases, from consultants building client decks to marketing teams producing internal pitch materials to executives preparing board presentations. Each of those segments has different pain points, different workflows, and different criteria for what makes a tool indispensable. “If you have a product that can serve many different segments or use cases, then you want to basically have creators that can target each one of those,” Lee explained. A creator whose audience is composed largely of management consultants will frame Gamma’s value differently than one whose followers are graphic designers or startup operators. Matching the creator to the use case is not a nicety—it is the mechanism that keeps the campaign from collapsing into noise.
How does a startup determine which influencer strategy will actually convert? The answer, according to Lee, lies in understanding that creator marketing is not a shortcut around product education but a form of it. The most effective influencers are those who can internalize the product’s strengths and communicate them authentically within their existing content style. When that alignment is present, the cost per acquisition can be dramatically lower than traditional advertising. When it is absent, the spend is largely wasted.
Engine’s Counter-Intuitive Bet on Cold Calls and Magicians
If Gamma represents the polished, digitally native end of the customer-acquisition spectrum, Engine sits at the opposite pole—and its founder is perfectly comfortable there. Elia Wallen’s company manages lodging and travel bookings for midsize businesses, a segment that requires trust, reliability, and the kind of relationship-building that no amount of social-media engagement can replace. Engine bootstrapped its way to $150 million in bookings before accepting any outside funding, a feat that Wallen attributes not to a clever TikTok strategy but to a stubborn commitment to older methods: events, referrals, and what he called “smiling and dialing.”
Cold calling has a reputation in startup culture as an artifact of a bygone era, a low-yield grind that smarter founders have replaced with inbound funnels and content marketing. Wallen pushed back hard on that assumption. “We still have a lot of people picking up the phone,” he said. “A lot of people who didn’t grow up with that or don’t understand it think that it’s outdated or it doesn’t work but it does. It’s a hard thing. There are a lot of companies that just refuse to do it or don’t know how to do it well. But they’re missing out on a very big offline client base.” His closing line was simple and pointed: “The phone still works.”
Wallen also shared a specific tactic from Engine’s early days that illustrates the broader principle. The company hired a magician named David to perform at industry events, drawing crowds with close-up tricks and then steering those conversations toward Engine’s booth. The approach was low-tech, personal, and memorable—the opposite of a scalable digital campaign. But for a company selling a service that requires significant trust from procurement managers and travel coordinators, that kind of face-to-face engagement created a foundation that no email sequence could replicate.
This is not to suggest that Engine is anti-technology or that Wallen rejects digital tools wholesale. The company uses data and automation to manage bookings and optimize its clients’ travel spend. But when it comes to the initial handshake—the moment when a prospect decides whether to give a new vendor their attention—Wallen believes that direct, human contact remains underrated, especially in business-to-business contexts where the decision cycle is long and the stakes are high.
Retention as a Growth Strategy: What Usage Data Reveals
Acquiring a customer is one challenge; keeping them is another, and Crystal Huang of Google Ventures argued that many founders underinvest in the second part because they are too focused on the first. Huang has worked with hundreds of startups across stages and sectors, and she has developed a clear framework for identifying whether early traction is sustainable. The signals, she said, are hiding in plain sight—inside the product itself.
Usage data tells a story that no pitch deck can fake. Huang advised founders to look beyond top-line metrics like registered users or monthly active accounts and instead examine patterns that reveal genuine engagement. Is usage recurring? Is it increasing over time? Are users referring colleagues or peers without being prompted? These are not vanity numbers; they are the earliest indicators of product-market fit. When Huang sees a startup where a meaningful subset of users is not just using the product regularly but actively promoting it, she pays attention. “You need to have ways to create evangelists who are really passionate about the product,” she said.
What is the most reliable early indicator that a startup’s customer acquisition strategy is working? According to Huang, it is the presence of super-fans: users who engage so deeply with the product that they want to work at the company, promote it on their own channels, or attach their personal brand to it. These users are worth more than their direct revenue because they amplify acquisition organically, reducing the cost of every subsequent customer. Founders who ignore this segment in favor of chasing new leads are leaving their strongest asset on the table.
Huang’s point ties the two halves of the acquisition puzzle together. Cold calling, influencer campaigns, and event marketing all feed the top of the funnel, but the funnel’s true efficiency depends on what happens after a customer signs up. Products that are genuinely useful create their own word-of-mouth momentum. Products that are merely well-marketed eventually stall. The startups that win, she suggested, are those that treat retention not as a post-acquisition afterthought but as a core design principle from day one.
Why Channel Strategy Cannot Be Separated From Product Strategy
The divergence between Gamma’s influencer playbook and Engine’s cold-calling approach might seem to suggest that customer acquisition is a matter of temperament or generational preference—digital natives pick TikTok, traditionalists pick the telephone. That reading is too simplistic. The more instructive takeaway is that the right channel is a function of the product itself, and that founders who choose a channel based on what is trendy rather than what is appropriate are setting themselves up for expensive lessons.
Gamma sells a tool that is inherently visual, inherently shareable, and inherently suited to demonstration via video. A creator can show an audience how to build a presentation in Gamma in sixty seconds, and the audience can immediately imagine using it for their own work. The product’s value proposition is transparent and experiential—seeing it once is often enough to generate a trial. Influencer marketing works for Gamma because the product is the kind that goes viral naturally once it is seen.
Engine sells a service that is invisible until something goes wrong. A travel-management platform for midsize businesses does not lend itself to a thirty-second explainer video. Its value is realized over months of consistent use, reliable support, and cost savings that accumulate gradually. The decision to adopt such a platform involves multiple stakeholders, procurement processes, and risk assessments. Cold calling and in-person events are not a nostalgic choice for Engine; they are the channels that allow the company to build the depth of trust that its sales cycle requires.
The implication for founders is straightforward: before choosing a channel, understand the nature of the decision you are asking a customer to make. Low-commitment, low-risk products can be sold through light-touch digital campaigns. High-commitment, high-risk products require a longer arc of engagement, and the channels that support that arc are often the ones that scale more slowly.
The Integration of Old and New: What Survives When Hype Fades
None of the Disrupt panelists argued that startups should abandon social media or that influencer marketing is a fad. Grant Lee’s success with Gamma proves that a well-executed creator program can be transformational. But the panel’s collective message was more nuanced than a simple endorsement of either camp. The founders who win, they suggested, are those who match their acquisition strategy to their product’s reality rather than to the zeitgeist. They are also the ones who understand that acquisition is not a discrete activity but a loop: find a customer, learn from that customer, improve the product, and let that improvement fuel the next wave of acquisition.
Elia Wallen’s magician, Grant Lee’s micro-influencers, and Crystal Huang’s super-fans all serve the same function. They are mechanisms for creating human connection in a market that is increasingly crowded with noise. Whether that connection happens over the phone, through a YouTube tutorial, or at a conference booth with a deck of cards matters far less than whether it is genuine. The founders who treat customer acquisition as a relationship to be built rather than a metric to be optimized are the ones who will still be growing when the next viral trend has come and gone.
- How did Engine achieve $150M in bookings without social media?Engine used cold calls and personal outreach, building relationships over the phone without any visible social media strategy.
- What was Gamma's influencer marketing program called?Gamma's program was called the Gambassador initiative, which recruited creators to produce content about the product.
- What mistake do founders often make with influencer marketing according to Grant Lee?Grant Lee says founders treat influencer marketing as a set-it-and-forget-it channel, failing to educate creators on the product's value.
